Unlicensed wireless protocols may attempt to access wireless channels without centralized coordination and planning, which may lead to collisions between different unlicensed transmissions. One technique for mitigating such collisions is referred to as Carrier-Sense Multiple Access/Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA). CSMA/CA includes a medium sensing stage, also called Clear Channel Assessment (CCA), during which a device senses a shared channel to determine a CCA status of a sub-band before performing a transmission.
Modern networks may use CCA on a wideband shared channel, which allows a wireless device to transmit or receive data over multiple sub-bands at the same time in order to increase the bandwidth available to the wireless device. Conventional schemes for wideband medium sensing divide the spectrum into a static number of sub-bands, and determine a CCA status on each sub-band individually. Techniques for improving the efficiency and collision avoidance of wideband medium sensing in unlicensed spectrum shared by coexisting wireless networks are desired.